


Intentionally Blank Page

by fracturedmoonlight



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Teacher-Student Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:45:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fracturedmoonlight/pseuds/fracturedmoonlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It's not where he always imagined he would spend his twenty-first Christmas, that's for sure.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intentionally Blank Page

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little Christmas present to everyone who reads my works. I promise updates will be coming ASAP--my break just started so free time is a thing now! 
> 
> Thank you so much for your support. I hope you enjoy this little one-shot I whipped out. Happy holidays!

> _The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it._
> 
> J. D. Salinger, _The_   _Catcher in the Rye_

* * *

 

He was in a dusty, dreary bar a short walk from his house in the center of downtown Shinganshina (but Shinganshina didn't really _have_ a downtown, they just liked to call it that, make it seem like a more exciting place to be).

It's not where he always imagined he would spend his twenty-first Christmas, that's for sure.

If someone had asked his twelve year-old self, he might have laughed and said, "With Mom and Dad and Mikasa, of course." He would have imagined his mother in her flowing brown skirt and burnt orange top, her most festive outfit, smiling, holding a plate of freshly baked _Pfefferneuse_ ; his father would be reading the newspaper, smiling contentedly by the fireplace. Mikasa would be wearing that rare smile as she unwraps a small box, sure fingers taking care not to rip any of the crisp edges. 

But then Mother got sick, and when Eren turned sixteen, Christmas became another day they all rushed madly to the hospital, another day they wondered how many _other_ days they had left.

They did not celebrate Christmas anymore once she was gone; it was another day Mikasa made dinner and she and Eren sat in relative silence, wondering when their Father would come back home.

They received the news that he had died of a heart attack a year and a half later. He'd been halfway across the country, living out of a car. Eren had wanted to feel anger, despair, but for some strange reason, it comforted him to know that his mother wasn't alone anymore.

He and Mikasa, thankfully, were both eighteen; they lived on in their childhood home, and Mikasa received a full scholarship to a prestigious university abroad to study music.

When she told Eren she intended to turn it down to stay with him, he had slapped her. _Hard_.

She had burst into silent tears, and Eren had immediately regretted his actions against the sister who took care of them both at the expense of her own happiness, but then he realized that sentiment was exactly why he had lashed out at her.

"I'll be fine," he told her firmly, and she had just nodded, slowly, before throwing her arms around him and sobbing with all the tears she had held back in her eighteen years of life.

He ended up at a small university a few states over, studying English. He had enough inheritance money to pay the rent of a cramped studio apartment along with his tuition. The classes were easy enough, and he had a lot of free time to sit in the park adjacent to his apartment and write out all the happy endings he couldn't have.

It was a tough decision to make, buying a bus ticket back to his home town for Christmas. Mikasa wasn't coming home—she had several performances in late December—but something strong and relentless pulled him back to the home he still owned but hadn't visited in years (a neighbor, Hannes, had promised to watch over the house and make sure no one broke in).

He stayed inside all day on Christmas Eve, curled up in the blanket his mother had knit years ago, lounging on their worn sofa. He wrote about a boy who wrote people back to life, and a girl who played the violin and lulled them back to eternal sleep.

He woke up early on Christmas morning and took a hike through the snow to a small clearing behind his house. He stood for a long time, staring at the bright white of the settled snow, then he marched back into the house and drank several cups of coffee. He called Mikasa and wishes her a happy Christmas, told her he was fine, lied about where he was. She told him she missed him, he convinced her that the feeling would always be mutual. He hung up first, but that wasn’t unusual.

Something about the call, the burning white of the snow, the emptiness of the house, drove him out, like he was the ghost being exorcised from that house, when, really, it should have been the other way around. 

He ended up in the only bar for twenty miles. It held a reputation for being a popular hangout for those who went to his high school and never sprouted wings and left the one-horse town that is Shinganshina. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew, but he also figured that none of the people he went to high school with would abandon their homes to be in a kitschy bar on Christmas Day.

So he sat in the near-empty bar, and he nursed a whiskey on the rocks, and he remembered why he fucking hated alcohol, but at least he was warm and alive, and that was something.

"That you, Yeager?"

The voice was rough but a familiar sense of comfort washed over him as he turned.

In front of him, looking at him with a mild look of surprise, was a man no taller than 5'3". He had obviously just come in from outside, snow still clinging to the bottom of his pressed black slacks. 

Eren blinked, and felt his ears heat up. "Mr. Ackerman," he said slowly.

The man snorted, to Eren's surprise (it hadn’t been the reaction he had anticipated, honestly).

"There's no need for formalities, kid."

And Eren's face flushed, because the man slid into the booth across from him as if it was natural, carefully setting his jacket next to him, and Eren was reminded of that day in the classroom after school when he was taking a test he missed since he'd gotten into a fight instead of showing up for English class seventh period, and it was just the two of them, and he'd looked up at his English teacher shyly in the middle of writing about the main themes of _Animal Farm_ , and maybe his split lip had made him courageous, because the next thing he knew, he was saying "I like you, Mr. Ackerman," and his teacher was sighing heavily.

It had been Mr. Ackerman, his English teacher, the man rumored to be the most grumpy and unapproachable teacher to walk the halls of Shinganshina Preparatory School, who had found him sobbing in an abandoned corner of the library the day his father told him his mother would not live another few months.

It had been Mr. Ackerman who had dragged him along to a café on the other side of town, set a steaming hot chocolate down in front of him, and told him he could spend the next few months making his mother worry about the state he'd be left in after she was gone, or making sure she knew he would live on in her honor.

"It's not something you had any part in. But now you have the option of making the rest of her time on this Earth comfortable or forcing her to worry about you until she's gone. So choose for yourself, whichever decision you'll regret the least." He had said evenly, looking Eren straight in the eyes across the tiny circular table between them.

Eren had burst into tears again, clutching his wrinkled khaki slacks, while Mr. Ackerman had stared at him silently, sipping his tea.

Eren had known the rumors about Mr. Ackerman since the beginning of the school year—that he was unfeeling, like a sociopath, had a permanently furrowed brow and a vile sense of humor—but he had never understood how people couldn’t see the way he looked at them: without a hint of the judgment they threw his way.

The man in front of him now looked tired, but that hadn’t changed at all; Eren remembered every detail, every line of the man’s face, because while painters memorized their subjects through repeatedly sketching, Eren memorized them through words. He remembered not only the scrawls he made across his page each night, the descriptions he wrote of the man who may or may not have realized was the one to save him, but the act itself, the way he tore into the thin pages when he got a detail wrong, when he thought of a better word for what he was trying to get across.

But for all the confessions he wrote in his notebook, in his head, on napkins at his part-time job at the local diner, he had only been able to bite out an “I like you” during a makeup quiz.

Mr. Ackerman had sighed that day, but had said nothing. Eren had continued, shame painting his face red as he scribbled the rest of his answer on the paper so hard it nearly ripped.

“Time’s up,” Mr. Ackerman had said after roughly half an hour, and Eren had passed him his test without looking up, then stalked out of the classroom after slinging his bag over his shoulder in silence.

He’d gone home with every intention of throwing out all of his notebooks, of cursing his teacher for being so kind, but he knew he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to forget the feelings wrapped up in the adjectives, the verbs, the prose that leaked from his fountain pen the day he made Mr. Ackerman laugh at something he said about _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or the day the older man reached up to pat his head the day he came back after taking the week off to attend to matters related to his mother’s funeral.

On the last day of school, Mr. Ackerman had stopped him before he left his classroom for the last time. Eren had distanced himself from the man, not staying after to ask him questions or argue with him about how _The C_ _atcher in the Rye_ was a great book, _you can’t remove something from the curriculum just because you don’t like it, geez, that’s so phony, Mr. Ackerman_.

“Thank you, Eren,” was all he said, and he had been graced with that rare half smile as he was handed a book—an old copy of _The_ _Catcher in the Rye_ , the binding hanging on by a literal thread, the cover worn so much the picture was nearly indiscernible.

Eren had just looked at him, confused, but Mr. Ackerman had just reached up to muss up his hair before walking down the hall, leaving Eren standing in the doorway of his classroom, wondering what he was being thanked for, what it all meant.

Mr. Ackerman didn’t return to Shinganshina Prep next year. Ms. Ral, a friend of Mr. Ackerman’s and Eren’s sophomore year history teacher, told him he had gotten a position at a university abroad teaching creative writing.

And so Eren had gone to college and read other books and loved them but never as much as he’d loved his eternally exhausted, thirty-something English teacher, the man currently seated across from him in this awful kitschy bar in this small, unpopular town.

Eren’s mouth was suddenly so dry he forced himself to immediately take a sip of the bitter liquid he regretted ordering the minute he took his first sip. He fought the urge to scrunch up his face at the taste.

Mr. Ackerman chuckled a bit, and Eren knew it was useless even attempting to hide his disdain for whiskey. “Petra told me you go to TU. Congratulations, wonderful English program. Tough to get into.”

“Thanks,” Eren said, frowning a bit at the knowledge that Ms. Ral had talked to Mr. Ackerman about him. What else had he told her? “You were in England, right?”

“Scotland, though I did teach a semester in London a few years ago, too.”

Silence returned, the same silence that had accompanied Eren to the bar, that had followed him back to his former home all the way from Trost.

Eren tossed the decrepit book on the table with little fanfare.

“You liar,” he whispered, but there was no more than affectionate indignation in his voice, and his cheeks were painted a soft pink.

Levi reached across the table, picked up the book with careful fingers.

He flipped open to a page with practiced ease and looked at it fondly.

“ _Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody._ 12/25/14, The Wall, 7 PM. See you there, brat.” Eren quoted the lines etched in the margins of the old copy as if he has rehearsed them a thousand times.

“Lying by omission is different from lying. I never said I didn’t like the book, I just said I took it off the reading list. You assumed I didn’t like it, just like how you assumed I didn’t have feelings for you, too.” Levi’s eyes were bright despite the dull light of the bar, and Eren thought about how none of the words he’d written and rewritten for the last five years could describe just how captivating that shade of blue-grey is.

“But you did,” Eren said, his heart rate speeding up despite the effects of the strong liquor.

“Do,” Levi corrected without a hint of trepidation, a wry smile on his face, and Eren instantly remembered the flippant way he corrected someone’s grammar in class. “I do.”

And Eren wanted to cry again, because there was something beautiful about the way his knowledge of the known moved to the unknown in the way that Levi’s hand moved from the top of his head to brush his cheek, and Eren caught a glimpse of the new wrinkles that settled in the creases of the other man’s eyes as he smiled at him.

It's not where he always imagined he would first kiss Levi, that's for sure.

But it was sweet despite the bitterness of the whiskey left on his tongue, and he didn’t remember Levi sliding right next to him, one hand running down his side. Eren kissed back with equal desperation, because he’d been waiting five damn years with the vaguest of love letters pressed between the pages of his favorite book, and he knew he would never get tired of reading the feelings written into the way that Levi kissed him.

Eren never understood why more stories didn’t have happy endings.

But, a year later, on Christmas Day, Levi runs a hand through his hair as he reads silently, and Eren closes his eyes, the warm touch lulling him to sleep, and Eren thinks that it’s okay, as long as his story has one, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> It's funny because I really don't like _The Catcher in the Rye_.


End file.
